The strange light, which was neither gloaming nor dawning, but a mixture of both, the waving boreal banners, the queer houses, gray with the storms of centuries, the brown undulating heaths, and the phosphorescent sea, made a strangely solemn picture which sank deep into their hearts.

After a pause, Christine went into the house, but John sat down on the stone bench to think over the alternatives before him.
Now the power of training up a child in the way it should go asserted itself.

It became at once a fortification against self-will.

John never had positively disobeyed his mother's explicit commands; he found it impossible to do so.

He must offer his services to Paul Calder in the morning, and try to trust Margaret Fae's love for him.
He had determined now to do right, but he did not do it very pleasantly--it is a rare soul that grows sweeter in disappointments.
Both mother and sister knew from John's stern, silent ways that he had chosen the path of duty, and they expected that he would make it a valley of Baca.